1,494 research outputs found
Recycling of carbon fibre composites
A clear case for carbon fibre recovery and reuse exists on environmental grounds due to the high cost and energy use of virgin fibre production. On a specific energy basis, carbon fibres can be recovered at around 10% of the energy required to manufacture virgin fibres but the scale of the recovery process can make a large difference to overall cost effectiveness. This study will describe the technical and economic challenges associated with the recycling of carbon fibres, the state of the art in recycling technologies and the re-use of fibres in high performance composites
Psychological stress reactivity and future health and disease outcomes: A systematic review of prospective evidence
Background
Acute psychological stress activates the sympatho-adrenal medullary (SAM) system and hypothalamo-pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis. The relevance of this stress reactivity to long-term health and disease outcomes is of great importance. We examined prospective studies in apparently healthy adults to test the hypothesis that the magnitude of the response to acute psychological stress in healthy adults is related to future health and disease outcomes.
Methods
We searched Medline Complete, PsycINFO, CINAHL Complete and Embase up to 15 Aug 2019. Included studies were peer-reviewed, English-language, prospective studies in apparently healthy adults. The exposure was acute psychological stress reactivity (SAM system or HPA axis) at baseline. The outcome was any health or disease outcome at follow-up after â„ 1 year.
Results
We identified 1,719 papers through database searching and 1 additional paper through other sources. Forty-seven papers met our criteria including 32,866 participants (range 30 â 4100) with 1- 23 years of follow-up. Overall, one third (32%; 83/263) of all reported findings were significant and two thirds (68%; 180/263) were null. With regard to the significant findings, both exaggerated (i.e. high) and blunted (i.e. low) stress reactivity of both the SAM system and the HPA axis at baseline were related to health and disease outcomes at follow-up. Exaggerated stress reactivity at baseline predicted an increase in risk factors for cardiovascular disease and decreased telomere length at follow-up. In contrast, blunted stress reactivity predicted future increased adiposity and obesity, more depression, anxiety and PTSD symptoms, greater illness frequency, musculoskeletal pain and regulatory T-Cell percentage, poorer cognitive ability, poorer self-reported health and physical disability and lower bone mass.
Conclusion
Exaggerated and blunted SAM system and HPA axis stress reactivity predicted distinct physical and mental health and disease outcomes over time. Results from prospective studies consistently indicate stress reactivity as a predictor for future health and disease outcomes. Dysregulation of stress reactivity may represent a mechanism by which psychological stress contributes to the development of future health and disease outcomes
Cell wall elongation mode in Gram-negative bacteria is determined by peptidoglycan architecture
Cellular integrity and morphology of most bacteria is maintained by cell wall peptidoglycan,
the target of antibiotics essential in modern healthcare. It consists of glycan strands,
cross-linked by peptides, whose arrangement determines cell shape, prevents lysis due to
turgor pressure and yet remains dynamic to allow insertion of new material, and hence
growth. The cellular architecture and insertion pattern of peptidoglycan have remained
elusive. Here we determine the peptidoglycan architecture and dynamics during growth in
rod-shaped Gram-negative bacteria. Peptidoglycan is made up of circumferentially oriented
bands of material interspersed with a more porous network. Super-resolution fluorescence
microscopy reveals an unexpected discontinuous, patchy synthesis pattern. We present
a consolidated model of growth via architecture-regulated insertion, where we propose only
the more porous regions of the peptidoglycan network that are permissive for synthesis
Biotic analogies for self-organising cities
Nature has inspired generations of urban designers and planners in pursuit of harmonious and functional built environments. Research regarding self-organisation has encouraged urbanists to consider the role of bottom-up approaches in generating urban order. However, the extent to which self-organisation-inspired approaches draw directly from nature is not always clear. Here, we examined the biological basis of urban research, focusing on self-organisation. We conducted a systematic literature search of self-organisation in urban design and biology, mapped the relationship between key biological terms across the two fields and assessed the quality and validity of biological comparisons in the urban design literature. Finding deep inconsistencies in the mapping of central terms between the two fields, a preponderance for cross-level analogies and comparisons that spanned molecules to ecosystems, we developed a biotic framework to visualise the analogical space and elucidate areas where new inspiration may be sought
Community outbreaks of group A Streptococcus revealed by genome sequencing
The frequent occurrence of disease outbreaks in humans caused by group A Streptococcus (GAS) is an on-going public health threat. Conventional bacterial typing methods lack the discriminatory power to confidently confirm or refute outbreaks in hospital and community settings. Microbial whole genome sequencing (WGS) provides a potential solution to this, but, there has been limited population-based surveillance with accompanying sequence data. We performed retrospective genomic surveillance of 93 clinical GAS isolates from individuals in a defined geographic region. Detailed clinical information was obtained for closely related clusters of isolates. Genomic sequence data was contextualised through comparison with international data. We identified 18 different emm genotypes within our bacterial population, and revealed both highly diverse and closely related isolates. This high level of diversity was maintained even in the context of international sequence data. We also identified two emm1 clusters, and one emm3 cluster, of closely-related isolates that differed only by 1 to 4 single nucleotide polymorphisms. Analysis of clinical information identified no healthcare associated contact between patients, indicating cryptic community transmission. Our findings suggest that genomic surveillance of GAS would increase detection of transmission and highlight opportunities for intervention
A New Cosmological Model of Quintessence and Dark Matter
We propose a new class of quintessence models in which late times
oscillations of a scalar field give rise to an effective equation of state
which can be negative and hence drive the observed acceleration of the
universe. Our ansatz provides a unified picture of quintessence and a new form
of dark matter we call "Frustrated Cold Dark Matter" (FCDM). FCDM inhibits
gravitational clustering on small scales and could provide a natural resolution
to the core density problem for disc galaxy halos. Since the quintessence field
rolls towards a small value, constraints on slow-roll quintessence models are
safely circumvented in our model.Comment: Revised. Important new results added in response to referees comment
A high resolution finite volume method for efficient parallel simulation of casting processes on unstructured meshes
We discuss selected aspects of a new parallel three-dimensional (3-D) computational tool for the unstructured mesh simulation of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) casting processes. This tool, known as {bold Telluride}, draws upon on robust, high resolution finite volume solutions of metal alloy mass, momentum, and enthalpy conservation equations to model the filling, cooling, and solidification of LANL castings. We briefly describe the current {bold Telluride} physical models and solution methods, then detail our parallelization strategy as implemented with Fortran 90 (F90). This strategy has yielded straightforward and efficient parallelization on distributed and shared memory architectures, aided in large part by new parallel libraries {bold JTpack9O} for Krylov-subspace iterative solution methods and {bold PGSLib} for efficient gather/scatter operations. We illustrate our methodology and current capabilities with source code examples and parallel efficiency results for a LANL casting simulation
Effect of fiber suspension jet stability on alignment quality of discontinuous carbon fiber tapes
A hydrodynamic alignment process has been developed for converting discontinuous random carbon fibers into tapes with a highly aligned orientation distribution to greatly improve the applicability of recovered fibers to composite parts. In hydrodynamic alignment processes short fibers are aligned by the velocity gradient along the flow direction in a convergent nozzle. Thereafter the jet of fiber suspension is deposited on a nylon mesh and the now redundant dispersion medium is drained away to leave an aligned fiber tape. The fundamental physical principles at work in the process have not been widely studied and are shown in the present work to greatly influence the properties of the resulting materials. In this work, the influence of suspension jet stability on the fiber orientation distribution was examined and the liquid jet break-up regime was determined. To explore the factors which can affect the suspension jet stability, different nozzle geometries, viscosities of dispersion media, fiber lengths and Reynolds numbers were applied in experimental work. The shear rate profiles inside different nozzles were simulated by Computational Fluid Dynamics methods and the results described in this paper
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